How to force-quit a stubborn app in MacOS
For many, MacOS is the most user-friendly operating system in the world. Along with this ease of use comes rock-solid applications that will never let you down.
In theory.
The reality can look a little different. Apps crash. I’ve had it happen with some regularity.
This is especially true for Apple Mail. It seems to work fine, but out of nowhere it stops syncing with my IMAP accounts and the usual method of closing the app does nothing.
How are you? restart machine? That’s one way to take care of the situation. It’s also not the most efficient method. Not only will you lose your flow, but you could inadvertently lose work. This is exactly what happened to me when I forgot a certain document was opened and not saved. Restart and blammo! document lost.
That’s not an option that anyone wants to deal with.
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And that brings us back to the question, what are you doing?
Fortunately, Apple has made it very easy to close stubborn applications. And for the really stubborn applications, there’s also the command line. I’ll show you both ways.
How to Quit a Stubborn App in MacOS
First the easy way. The first method we will discuss is the GUI tool, aptly named Force Quit.
If you have an application that stops responding, click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the desktop and choose Force Quit.
In the resulting popup, you will see a list of all your currently running applications. Locate and select the app you want to force quit, then click Force Quit. That should close the app in question. You can then reopen it and it should return to its regularly scheduled reliability.
You can force quit any user-facing app in macOS using the Force Quit tool. Image: Jack Wallen
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The command line method
You may not know this, but MacOS is very similar to Linux on many levels. For example, macOS includes a powerful command-line tool that can simplify many tasks… even kill rogue applications.
If you find that the Force Quit tool isn’t working for the app you’re trying to quit, or maybe you want to get acquainted with the command line interface, let me show you how easy it is to quit an app. I’m going to show you the easiest method (because there’s a harder way to do it from the terminal, but I don’t want to put you off the terminal).
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If you have a stubborn application, open the Launch Pad, search for Terminal, and then open the Terminal app. Let’s say Apple Mail isn’t responding and you want to close it from the terminal. For this you would use the killall command like this:
Killall Mail
What if you don’t know an app’s actual name (or even better, the command to launch the app)? You can contact them for this above Command. When you issue the command above, you will see a list of all running applications. In the COMMAND column you can see the names to be used with kill all Command.
That above Command run in macOS terminal alternative iTerm. Image: Jack Wallen
Be careful with that kill all command and only use it to kill applications that are not part of the system. A good rule of thumb is if you don’t know what it’s doing, don’t kill it.
And this, my friends, is how you can close stubborn applications on MacOS. To be clear, you should always use the Force Quit app by default and only switch to the terminal window if Force Quit doesn’t work.